The website for Viktor & Rolf’s fragrances. It has that luxury minimalism with the hint of edginess that personifies the label and does it beautifully. It also extracts consumer behaviour information from you with enough promises of presents and secrets to just make you love them all the more.

A reminder of why I love this brand so much…

What’s not::

…the new ad for Coca-Cola, from the Pemberton campaign.

Coca-Cola usually does some fantastic things with their ads, because let’s face it – they can afford it. They let agencies like Wieden & Kennedy show just how amazing they are. Preiously the focus has been on image, aspiration and emotion.

But this one brings the focus back to the drink itself, and the fact that it’s ‘all natural’. It talks about the recipe which was supposedly created by founder John Pemberton in 1886, which ‘hasn’t changed since’. (Not quite true.)

It has been pointed out that many people did not know that there are no artificial flavourings in the drink, but I think this is more because they haven ‘t thought about it. The thing is, nobody really knows what’s in Coke, and its fans don’t really care. If they wanted to be healthier, they’d just drink Coke Zero.

What really annoys me is that this ad really shows the drink as a ‘heritage’ kind of brand, which for me is intuitively wrong. The brand has been around for ages but the value in that is that it’s stayed ‘cool’ the whole time.

Coke’s niche isn’t some family-friendly, healthy segment. It isn’t even about an amazing tasting drink. You drink it because it makes you feel like it improves your lifestyle. By trying to move into another segment they may make people start thinking about what really is in their drink and lose fans along the way.

[Of course, there is the health issue which IS worrying…in Kenya the drink epitomises Western culture, and with increasing consumption the incidence of diabetes is also increasing.]

Still, the ‘Intrinsics’ campaign released simultaneously which uses ‘blipverts’ (5s ads) which evokes the sounds associated with Coke could be very effective.